After Progressive Weakness in Assembly Primary: Opening to Change the Bail Law, Build Common Sense Movement in NY
By Gary Tilzer
Before the June Primary attempts to reform the controversial bail law failed, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, and Albany incumbents facing re-election feared challengers to their power positions from the growing successful left-wing political machine led by Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Working Families Party (WFP), and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Incumbent moderate lawmakers have been warned by the progressive machines that they would challenge their reelection if they voted for bail reforms to protect their constituents from the city’s rising crime. Fear of losing their reelections or leadership posts blocked the mayor’s efforts to give NYS judges the authority to keep dangerous repeat offenders in the bail system and the seriously mentally ill in hospitals. The June primary showed the Albany gang that the only thing they had to fear was fear itself. 7 of the 9 Assembly incumbents that AOC’s PAC “Courage to Change” and the other progressive machines went after, won their reelections.
With the progressive’s poor showing against Assembly incumbents, a great opportunity to reform the bail law has opened up. The mayor, voters, and newspaper editorial boards need to put pressure on Albany elected officials to call a special session to change the bail law. The June primary results, the 31% increase in crime, and recent polls showing 75% of New Yorkers support bail reform will assure the State Senate candidate running for reelection in the August Primary against progressives, that the voters would have their back if they stood up and showed leadership on crime-fighting. The Albany culture is defined by the “Big Ugly” budget deals, where negotiations are done hidden from public view, and every bill is voted on during one massive budget deal. Nobody stands up for the public interests, everything is a secret deal that they think assures their main and only real goal, to get reelected. The press has almost no coverage of local races, which helps the elected officials hide from the public. i.e., the challenge from the interlocking and well-funded left political machines to their reelection is more important to incumbents, than protecting the public with bail reform, who lack a political machine to run a candidate against them.
The arrests and jailing of bodega worker Jose Alba by DA Bragg, and the $250,000 bail set by Judge Eric Schumacher, sent a well like hard-working 61-year-old store clerk immigrant from the Dominican Republic to Rikers for murder. Until public and media outrage of charging a man for defending himself forced the DA and another judge to reduce the bail to $50,000. Without a doubt, the bodega self-defense arrest increased the percentage of New Yorkers who are disgusted with NY’s criminal justice system. Police Commissioner Sewell blamed the bail law for the increase in crime; the department was arresting the same people for crimes “over and over again.” By allowing NYC to drift with no clear leadership to take on Albany, major damage is being done to the city’s future.
The 2022 June Primary did show progressives are power-hungry. They even went after incumbents Assembly members that voted for their 2019 bail reform law, which ignited the current crime wave. A big clue that the progressives are not about reforming government was their silent support for the unconstitutional redistricting, which attempted to take power away from the voters, by cutting district lines to make incumbents’ reelections easier. Let’s hope that common-sense elected officials and other city leaders have learned that appeasement against a charging army does not work. Ideological progressives are not going to be beaten with negative flyers, the battle will be very long and hard. The 2020 census indicates the biggest increases in NYC’s population will come from gentrifying young, progressive voting out of towners. The winner of the very liberal gentrified 10th Congressional District that goes through Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights, and Soho, could be a future AOC-type media star and progressive machine political boss. de Blasio one of the 15 candidates running already has a progressive machine and media moxie if he wins. Even Berlin Rosen who is working for de Blasio opponent Dan Goldman will renew their partnership with the former mayor if he wins, it’s all about money and power. Remember Albany lawmakers bowing down to political insiders, do not require runoffs in congressional or any elections. They could care less that there should be a majority consensus of the district voters on who represents them in Congress or in any other office. That means that de Blasio who is widely hated, even in the 10th Congressional District can win with 12% of the vote in the 15-candidate race. In NYC except on Staten Island whoever wins the Democratic Primary for Congress is ready to be sworn in.
A City With No Clear Leadership, Fails With CYA Elected Officials Disconnected From the Voters Who Elected Them
Crime is causing chaos that is eating away at the heart of the city, its residents, and developers’ assets. There will never be a real recovery of NYC’s economy until the bail law is reformed. Bail reform will send a message to common-sense New Yorkers that we are back in control. Now it is time for summer primary developer soldiers to send their mailings to the voters who live in Albany leader’s districts and demand a special session to pass bail reform. Newspapers must go back to their role of putting pressure on elected officials instead of reprinting their press releases:
Paul Starr, the distinguished Princeton scholar, maintains that the failure of the newspaper business has fragmented the public’s understanding of politics and government. Star believes that strong newspapers of the past provided the public a powerful means of leverage over politicians and the state.
The Jewish Voice has written recently about how the newspapers no longer properly inform the voters about the candidates running, and the politics of the city. Professor Starr believes that the end of the age of newspapers implies a change in our political system itself, where insiders and left-wing activists will gain more control. The Jewish Voice has been reporting that the average citizen in NY has been cut out of politics and government and needs a leader to step up to fill the void left by the end of the newspaper era, to put common sense New Yorkers back in control.
- Why is The NY Times, Daily News, Post Ignoring Why New Yorkers are Not Voting, The 4th of July Primary Message the Media Missed
- WPIX’s Mannarino, All the NY Media Ignore the Big Story: AOC/Lander Left-Wing Political War to Take Over NY
- In the Scripted News Era, Journalists & Elected Officials Become Actors, NY Special Interests Pull the Strings
Mr. Adams: The City Needs A Common-Sense Political Movement
The Mayor is the only one who can connect with the voters and build a movement to take on the left-wing. To stop progressives from increasing powers it will take more than flyers during an election. Or NY1 Kurt Loder emotionless news bots who read their scripts telling us the public fears are overblown, after a July 4th weekend where 51 New Yorkers were shot.
Mayor Adams needs to create a common-sense New Yorkers take back the neighborhood’s movement, to fill the void left by the decline of the city’s newspapers’ leadership role. New Yorkers are moving out of the city because they feel nobody is listening or cares about their needs. Leadership is complicated and could be costly to one’s political career. However, only by having the voters and the city’s back, can the progressives who are already warming up Lander for a run in 2025 for mayor, be stopped.
Adams did stand up to the progressives in the primary by endorsing many of the winning incumbents against AOC progressive challengers. However, progressives are clever, they will find ways around any attack on them. DSA leader Controller Lander already has the full attention of the developers who used the city’s heavily subsided ferry taxis system, to sell their Brooklyn and Queens apartments. The Comptroller already has a history of using banks and low-income developers to fund his 5th Avenue Committee nonprofit, which he uses to create and run progressive local candidates.
The City Needs A Leader to Take on the Progressives
“A leader is a dealer in hope.” —Napoleon Bonaparte 2. Do what you feel in your heart to be right–for you’ll be criticized anyway.” —Eleanor Roosevelt 3. “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.” —Benjamin Franklin
Mayor Adams should make a major speech not only for bail reform but with his plan to wake up and empower NYC’s sleeping giant, common-sense New Yorkers, to turn around the city’s out-of-control downward spiral. The speech should be given in the same Cooper Union auditorium where Abraham Lincoln became a serious candidate for president. In attendance should be community and business leaders and children whose future is tied to the economic health of the city. Taking the lead in demanding that Albany hold a special session to change the bail law will give Adams the public support to easily be reelected and build an army of common-sense New Yorkers to push back the progressives and put the city back on track.
NY Times Also has the Power to Put the City Back on Track, But Chooses to Stick to Their Liberal Crime Narrative
Who does the Times think they are fooling? Americans’ confidence in newspapers and television news has plummeted to an all-time low, according to the latest annual Gallup survey. The newspaper of record is ignoring the crisis in journalism while they continue to act as a political party boss. They are also not reporting on the reality that both parties have become radicalized destroying the ability of the governments that function best with compromise, to serve the people properly.
The NY Times made a mistake by not investigating the multiple federal investigations of the WFP, de Blasio, and their lobbyist’s operatives. The old gray lady let down all those who counted on the city’s economic engine to fill their buildings, provide customers for their small businesses, and operate good schools that the middle class wanted to send their children to. The paper of record follows their liberal narrative and was taken advantage of by the power-hungry progressives who clearly did not understand what it takes to keep NYC’s economy growing. They allowed political operatives to build a left-wing machine with shadow government lobbyists, which are now a major power player in the city and state. Lobbyists like Berlin Rosen whose clients include gentrifying developers, city contractors, and a progressive candidate who supported the distractive bail law. Not only has the Times and the rest of the media abdicated their role of protecting NYC’s economic engine they allowed a political class to grow that fits the new gray lady’s ideologically narrative but are clueless on what it takes to make sure the city remains a world-class city.
Former MTA Chair Richard Ravitch is probably the only one left to hold an intervention with the NY Times current leadership, to try to get them to abandon their narrative on crime to join the fight to restore the city’s economy and make NY a place where a majority of New Yorkers do not want to flee. Does the Times really believe that when New Yorkers watch the video of the old Bodega store clerk defending himself, they are debating crime and politics? Living in a bubble on 43rd Street, where they replaced streetwise opinionated reporters over the years with power climbers, they only are fooling themselves and destroying the city that made them. Perhaps the Times should assign Peter Baker to cover NYC local politics. Unfortunately, Public opinion, even, in reality, does not matter to ideology-driven newspapers, and the rules, and the election law does not matter to progressive power-hungry political operatives.
The former mayor and WFP and their operatives were under federal investigation for ACORN, WFP’s Data and Field. WFP-connected lobbyists were all part of pay-to-play de Blasio’s PAC Campaign for One NY, which laundered pay-to-play donations from developers and city contractors for upstate senate campaigns, by his shadow government lobbyist. The media should have investigated WFP and de Blasio’s connections to lobbyists like Berlin Rosen, Red Horse, and The Advance Group who built the initial progressives political machine. Others like AOC, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and Comptroller Lander have developed their left-wing machines. They all have interlocking nonprofits and PACs like AOC’s Courage to elect progressive candidates. Jewish Voice AOC & the Progressives’ Interlocking Directorates are the New Bosses of Brooklyn & the 2022 City Council The lander machine uses city-funded nonprofits Jewish Voice WPIX’s Mannarino, All the NY Media Ignore the Big Story: AOC/Lander Left-Wing Political War to Take Over NY
Paterson’s “Phantom” Challenges Brooklyn Democratic Party Leaders
Someone needs to talk to former Governor Paterson who declared AOC a ‘Phantom of the Media’ in the NY Post after she lost most of her races against Assembly incumbents. Paterson needs to talk with Brooklyn Democratic Party Boss Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn who besides watching her husband lose his District Leadership position, pressure from the old guard to resign, could lose her position as party boss in September. It looks like both the progressives including independents and the County Boss Bichotte both control 22 of Kings County’s 44 District Leader seats. Many of the District Leaders on both sides are not of the highest moral standards, they are looking for deals to make money or gain the power to run for higher office. In 1990 after Mike Garson and the late Lew Fidler helped make Anne English a District Leader, she switched her vote from Garson’s county leader bid and made Clarence Norman leader of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, by one vote, after he agreed to make her his deputy.
It is impossible to know who or if anyone will be in control of the Brooklyn Democratic Party to pick this year’s crop of Supreme Court Judges this summer at the Judicial Convention. The NYU Brennan Center for Justice has done numerous studies that political parties and court insiders choose most of NY’s Judges. Most judicial elections are non-competitive and when there is more than one judicial candidate on the ballot, voters know little about the judicial candidates running. Judges should not be an arm of the political machines, court insiders, or chosen by the mayor and government selection committees full of the same party and court insiders. We need elected judges who reflect the values of all New Yorkers, not just the special interests. To make judicial elections easier to understand, Civil Court Judges should be elected by Assembly Districts. Supreme Court Judges should be elected by State Senate Districts. Judicial elections need public funding, and the state should mail every vote a bio of every judicial candidate, as the city does of every City Council candidate. NY needs an elected third branch of government, an independent judiciary, to speak out against bad laws made by the other two branches of government, not one controlled by political insiders by regulations. Some in Albany and within the state’s court system want to take the control of electing judges away from the voters. With NY Chief Judge Janet DiFiore stepping down from a position that was once elected, now appointed, it is time for the media and all New Yorkers to investigate who picks the judges.
Tammany Hall Power Came From the Voters it Served
The Old Tammany Hall Machine was as corrupt as today’s pay-to-play lobbyists who now run New York’s political system. But the Tammany of the Boss Tweed era empowered the neighborhoods that it served and was responsive to the voters. Terry Golway’s book “Machine Made” explained how Tammany Hall used a network of neighborhood leaders called district captains to turn out voters to win elections. To make sure the voters came out on election day to vote for Tammany’s candidates, Tammany captains offered the voters and their families social services and protected their community. Tammany Hall’s governing style was responsible for creating New York’s strong Neighborhoods of old. With the transfer of patronage to elected officials and the transfer of social services to the city and state’s government, the party machines adapt from the bottom up to top-down organization, to survive. The post 60’s party machine began cutting out the voters as they started doing favors only for its members, pay-to-play clients, family, and friends.
The Privatization of Tammany Hall Has Cut Out the Voters
Private unelected lobbyist-consultants, who gain power by getting candidates elected and then using them to get pay-to-play favors for their developer and city contractor clients from City Hall and Albany, run most of the campaigns nowadays. The lobbyist-consultants never meet or serve the voters as the old Tammany Hall captains did. The private lobbyist-consultants business model does not care if their developer clients are pushing out long-time neighborhood residents. They simply find a new candidate in the next election who appeals to the new gentrified voters of the district. Lobbyist consultants make money off of racially resegregating neighborhoods with their developer clients while electing progressive candidates who promise to help the poor and minority communities. The campaign mailers they deliver are poll-driven spins telling the voters what they want to hear. In the last 20 years, these lobbyists-consultants have formed an unelected shadow machine and government that is battling the weakened out-of-touch p
arty machines for the control of NYC’s streets and politics.
Can NYC Which Historically Helped Immigrants, the Poor, and Minorities Become the Best They Could Be, Continue?
Progressives who tell us today that we have to reimagine the NYC government, have no understanding that historically strong immigrant neighborhoods electing representatives who supported big business, help make NYC the greatest city in the world. A tapestry of immigrant groups built the economically strong city before today’s socialist elected officials were born. NY’s openness to immigrants created a unique and special city with richness in character and creativity that was recognized all over the world. The strong neighborhoods gave generations of New Yorkers the ability to climb up the ladder to build extraordinarily successful lives – to live the American Dream. It gave Colin Powell’s Jamaican immigrant family the ability to raise a son to become Secretary of State, and a possible presidential candidate. The secret magic of NYC is that the welcome of the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty did not end with immigrants’ ships arriving at NYC’s shores. We are losing that NYC. A few years ago, the late journalist Pete Hamill said developers were sucking the life out of NYC’s neighborhood eco-system, causing New Yorkers to lose a sense of themselves as people in control of their own lives. Hamill further said the richness of character of growing up in the city’s neighborhoods, was being determined by some other standard but not by the standard that had shaped him and the generations that made New York City a special place. What Hamill did not see was that progressives who profess to pass bills to help the poor, minority, and immigrants have weakened NYC’s Golden Goose economy, by allowing crime to increase, which leads to the feeling nobody is in control. If the city’s economy continues to fail, that important NYC ladder available to immigrants, the poor, and minorities of past generations will be broken and so will our city.
